Fact check: Romney's skewed case on jobs

An occasional look at statements by political candidates and how well they adhere to the facts.

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney has come up with an “amazing statistic” and Republicans inside and outside his presidential campaign are doing their utmost to spread it around: “92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the Obama years have been lost by women.”

Amazing it may be. As a meaningful measure of Obama’s economic record and its effect on women, though, it is dubious at best.

Romney’s math is solid as far as it goes. But more men than women have lost jobs since the recession began — that’s why economists called it a “man-cession.”

In blaming Obama for “turning the clock back 20 years on American women,” as the Romney campaign puts it, Republicans are hoping to counter Obama’s perceived advantage with female voters. But they ignore how recessions generally — and the last one in particular — unfold, and they hold Obama accountable for the state of the economy from the time he took office, before his policies could make any difference.

A look at the claim and how it compares with the facts:

ROMNEY: “This is an amazing statistic. The percentage of jobs lost by women in the president’s three years, three and a half years — 92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the Obama years have been lost by women.” — Hartford, Conn., on Wednesday.

THE FACTS: The deep recession that began 13 months before Republican George W. Bush left the White House hit men harder than women at the beginning. Recessions often do that because male-dominated enterprises such as construction and manufacturing tend to be the first to tumble in a downturn. Eventually, sectors with more women in the workforce follow suit, and that happened mostly after Obama took office.

In the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 — with high unemployment lingering to this day — the crisis in the financial sector and bursting of the housing bubble accentuated the damage to jobs held primarily by men. “The initial losses were even more male-dominated than normal because of the nature of the recession,” Swonk said.

Women were more heavily represented in jobs that suffered in the recession’s later months and beyond, as revenue-strapped state and local governments laid off teachers and cut other public-sector workers.

Romney’s claim is based on statistics showing the number of unemployed women grew by 858,000 since January 2009, Obama’s inauguration month. But it ignores the disproportionate hit on men the year before Obama became president — and their greater job losses overall.

Some 3.4 million men and 1.8 million women have lost jobs since the recession started, according to the government.

When Obama took office, unemployment for men (8.6 percent) was already sharply higher than for women (7 percent). The rate peaked for men at 11.2 percent in October 2009 and for women at 9 percent a month later.

Since then, the gap has nearly closed. Last month, the rate was 8.3 percent for men and 8.1 percent for women.

ADVISORY: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here and for
following agreed-upon rules of civility. Posts and
comments do not reflect the views of this site. Posts and comments are
automatically checked for inappropriate language, but readers might find some
comments offensive or inaccurate. If you believe a comment violates our rules,
click the "Flag as offensive" link below the comment.

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Groucho Marx

Obama did not take office in a vacuum, the recession did not begin with his inauguration, and job losses in the recession didn't either.

Disconnecting Obama from what went on before he was elected, and blaming him for everything that has happened since his election, is disingenuous at best.

The GOTP controlled the federal government for most of the 2000s, and should take their share of the credit for the recession, including the deregulation and lax/lack of oversight which made a few much wealthier, and many of the rest of US, much poorer.

And their answer to the Problem is to return to deregulation and lack of oversight.

There are a number of terms to describe doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results, and a number of those terms describe the GOTP also.